Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
429--445
Jo-Ann Tsang
Southern Methodist University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to C. Daniel Batson, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045
[e-mail: dbatson@ku.edu].
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C
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the level of concern for the welfare of other individuals in the community and of the
community as a whole. Failures to act for the common good are conspicuous: trashlittered public parks, streets, and highways; polluted rivers and streams; dropping
water tables and shrinking reservoirs; reduced social services and underfunded
schools; undersubscribed organ donor and big brother/big sister programs; and
insufficient funds for the local humane society, symphony, and public TV.
The mayor is well-aware that these failures are only half of the picture. There
are times when people in town do act for the common good. They do at times
pick up litter, recycle, carpool, and vote. Many who can, do contribute to public
TV and the United Way. Many help their neighbors in need, and if able, serve
as volunteers in hospitals, nursing homes, AIDS hospices, and fire departments.
But not enough is being done. The mayor wants to know what can be done to
increase the likelihood that people in town will act in ways that benefit others in
the community and the community as a whole.
The mayor calls such action community involvement or acting for the common good; we will too. The mayor wants to know: Should there be a new school
program? If so, what sort of programa new civics class, character education,
optional or required community service? And at what levelprimary grades, secondary grades, or college? Should there be an inquiry and report to the town
council? Should there first be a survey of the populace to identify perceived needs
and possible solutions? Should there be an ad campaign (Just say yes! perhaps)?
Should whatever is done emerge from self-identified communities of mutual interest within the larger community? The mayor is asking for our advice.
Initial panic on our part. Once we catch our breath and regain a little composure, some thoughts begin to form. First and foremost is the conviction that
although we would love to be able to provide the direction the mayor is seeking,
we cannotat least not by ourselves. The puzzle is too big and complex. We can,
we believe, provide a piece or two needed to solve the puzzle, but there are many
other pieces that must come from others. The mayoror someone elsewill have
to put all of these pieces together.
The pieces that we can provide concern motives that might lead a person to act
for the common good. We can, and shall, offer the mayor a conceptual framework
for thinking about these motives. First, however, we need to specify what we mean
when we speak of motives.
Motives as Goal-Directed Forces to Obtain or Maintain Valued States
Relating motives to values and goals. Following Kurt Lewin (1951), we view
motives as goal-directed forces induced by threats or opportunities related to ones
values. Values can be defined, most generally, as relative preferences; Mary values
State A over State B if she would consistently choose State A over State B, with all
other things being equal. If a negative discrepancy is perceived between a current
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or anticipated state and a valued state, then obtaining or maintaining the valued
state is likely to become a goal. If, for example, you value having bicycle paths on
which to ride, then approval of a proposed plan to create them in your community
is likely to be a goal, which will in turn induce motivation directed toward reaching
this goal. This motivation may lead you to collect signatures in support of the plan.
Distinguishing ultimate goals from instrumental goals and unintended consequences. It is possibleand importantto distinguish among ultimate goals,
instrumental goals, and unintended consequences (see Heider, 1958; Lewin, 1951).
Ultimate goals are the valued states the individual is seeking to reach. Ultimate
does not here mean cosmic or most important; it simply refers to the state or
states a person is seeking at a given time (e.g., bike paths on which to ride). It is
the ultimate goal that defines a motive; each different motive has a unique ultimate
goal evoked by a unique value.
Instrumental goals are sought because they are stepping-stones to ultimate
goals. When an ultimate goal can be reached more efficiently by other means, an
instrumental goal is likely to be bypassed. A business executive may be motivated to
support the bike paths as an instrumental means to enhance his or her public image.
If so, he or she is likely to lose interest if a less expensive image-enhancing opportunity arises. (The distinction between instrumental and ultimate goals should not
be confused with Rokeachs [1973] distinction between instrumental and terminal
values. All of the values named by Rokeach could induce either instrumental or
ultimate goals, depending on whether the valuee.g., a world at peaceis sought
as an end in itself or as a means to some other ende.g., personal safety.)
Pursuit of a goal, whether instrumental or ultimate, may produce effects
sometimes dramaticthat are not themselves a goal. These are unintended consequences. It is possible to benefit others or the community as an unintended
consequence of pursuing some other goal. A desire to have a safe, cheap, and
pleasant route to work may lead me and others like me to volunteer to help build
the bike path, resulting in reduced gasoline consumption and pollution and in
preservation of a green space to the benefit of the larger community. Or consider a
more charged example: A business executive, motivated to maximize profit, may
move a factory into a depressed area to take advantage of the cheap labor. Quite
unintentionally, this profit-driven action may enhance the quality of life in the
community by providing those without work with jobseven if poorly paid. It
may also create not only some benefit but also dependence and exploitation. (For
further discussion of the relations among values, goals, and motives, see Batson,
1991, 1994.)
Focusing on motives, not only behavior. A major implication that both Lewin
(1951) and Heider (1958) wished to draw from the distinctions among ultimate
goals, instrumental goals, and unintended consequences was the importance of
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focusing ones attention on motives rather than on behavior, even if ones goal
is to increase a type of behavior, such as community involvement. Behavior is
highly variable. Whether a given behavior will occur in a given situation depends
on the strength of some motive that might evoke that behavior as well as on (a) the
strength of complementary and competing motives, if any, (b) how the behavior
relates to each of these, and (c) the other behavioral options available in the situation
at the time. As in the examples cited above, the more directly a given behavior
promotes an ultimate goal, and the more uniquely it does so among the behavioral
options available, the more likely it is to occur when the value underlying that
motive is activated by threat or opportunity. In contrast, behavior that promotes
an instrumental goal can easily change as the behavioral options to reach that
goal change, or as the causal association between the instrumental and ultimate
goals changes. Behavior that is an unintended consequence can easily change as
the behavioral options change, unless this behavior is inextricably linked to some
other behavior that directly and uniquely promotes the ultimate goal. Invariance
and explanatory stabilityis found not in behavior but in the underlying link of a
given motive to its ultimate goal (Lewin, 1951).
Motives can cooperate or conflictand can change. An individual can have
more than one ultimate goal and so, more than one motive at once. When this
occurs, as it often does, these motives may cooperate or conflict. Moreover, a
persons motives can change over time, often quickly. Motive and motivation
as we are using these terms refer to states, not to dispositions. Which motives arise
in a given situation are a function of the values of the individual and the nature
of the situation. Some values are relatively durable and threats or opportunities
related to them persist, producing an enduring motive. Other values may be more
changeable; threats and opportunities related to these values may elicit motives
only in certain situations.
Motives as current goal-directed forces, not as dispositions or needs. The
perspective on motivation that we have sketched owes much more to Kurt Lewin
than to another pioneer in research on motivation, Henry Murray. Lewin (1951)
treated goals as force fields within the current life space of the individual; he
treated motives as goal-directed forces in these fields; and he treated values as
power fields that could, under the appropriate circumstances, activate motivational
forces. These motivational forces could, in turn, produce behavior, or movement
within the life space. Murray (1938) and his followers treated motives as relatively stable dispositions or needs (e.g., achievement motivation), which are more
nearly equivalent to values than to motives in Lewins framework. As noted, Lewin
emphasized the distinction among instrumental goals, ultimate goals, and unintended consequences (as did Heider, 1958); Murray gave little attention to these distinctions. For Lewin, the list of potential motives is endless; it is as rich and varied
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Motive
Ultimate Goal
Strength(s)
Egoism
Increase ones
own welfare.
Many forms;
easily invoked;
powerful.
Altruism
Increase the
welfare of one
or more other
individuals.
Powerful; may
generalize to group
of which other is
a member.
Collectivism
Powerful; directly
focused on common
good.
Directed toward
universal and
impartial good.
Principlism
Weakness(es)
Increased community involvement
relates to the motive only
as an instrumental means or
unintended consequence.
May be limited to individuals
for whom empathy is felt;
increased community involvement
relates to the motive only
as an instrumental means or
unintended consequence.
May be limited to ingroup.
act for the common good needs to consider all four. It needs to consider not only
the existence of all four but also their interplay. For a given individual in a given
situation, more than one of these motives may be present at once. When this is
the case, the motives may either conflict or cooperate with one another. Before
considering their interplay, however, let us say a little more about each of these
motives as a basis for community involvement. Table 1 provides an overview of
our analysis.
Egoism: Serving the Community to Benefit Oneself
Egoism is the most obvious motive for acting for the common good. Action
that serves the common good can be egoistically motivated if this action either
is instrumental to reaching the ultimate goal of self-benefit, or is an unintended
consequence of reaching this goal. For example, a philanthropist may endow a
hospital or university to gain recognition and a form of immortality; a capitalist,
nudged by Adam Smiths (1776/1976) Invisible Hand, may create jobs and enhance
the standard of living of the community while motivated by a relentless pursuit of
personal fortune; a student may volunteer at a local nursing home to add community
service to her resume. All three are egoistically motivated; yet the action of each
may benefit the community. Reflecting on what motives might induce people to act
for the common good, ecologist and social-policy analyst Garrett Hardin (1977)
concluded that egoism is not simply the most obvious. He concluded that it is
the only motive sufficiently pervasive and powerful to do the job. Hence, Hardin
proposed his Cardinal Rule of Policy: Never ask a person to act against his own
self-interest (p. 27).
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Varieties of egoistic motivation. A number of self-benefits can be the ultimate goal of acting for the common good. One can act to gain material, social, or
self-rewards (e.g., pay or prizes, recognition, praise, esteem enhancement), or to
avoid material, social, or self-punishments (e.g., fines, avoidance of censure, guilt,
shame). When one looks beyond the immediate situation to consider long-term
consequences and intangible benefits for oneself, self-interest becomes enlightened (Dawes, van de Kragt, & Orbell, 1990). From an enlightened perspective, one
may see that headlong pursuit of self-interest will lead to less long-term personal
gain than will acting for the common good, so one may decide to act for the common good as an instrumental means to reach the ultimate goal of maximizing selfbenefit. Appeals to enlightened self-interest are often used by politicians and social
activists trying to encourage action for the common good. They warn us of the eventual consequences for ourselves and our children of pollution or of under-funded
schools; they remind us that an unchecked epidemic may, in time, reach into our
home; or that if the plight of the poor becomes too severe, we may face revolution.
The motivation they seek to arouse is egoistic; they threaten our enlightened selfinterest.
Non-tangible self-benefits of acting for the common good have sometimes
been called side payments (Dawes et al., 1990). One may, for example, act for
the common good as a means to reach the ultimate goal of avoiding social censure or guilt. As John Stuart Mill (1861/1987) put it in his defense of Utilitarianism: Why am I bound to promote the general happiness? If my own
happiness lies in something else, why may I not give that the preference?
(p. 299). Mills answer was that we will give our own happiness preference until, through education, we learn the sanctions for doing so. These include external sanctions stemming from social censure (including divine censure) and
internal sanctions stemming from conscience. Freud (1930/1961) presented a
similar view, as have most social-learning and norm theorists since. The side
payments need not be negative; there are also non-tangible self-rewards of community service. People may get involved to see themselvesor be seen by others
as caring, concerned, responsible, good people. Pursuit of such side payments
may provide great benefit to the community; still, the underlying motivation is
egoistic.
Promise and problems of egoism as a source of action for the common good.
Egoistic motives offer promise for promoting the common good because they are
easily aroused and are potent. They offer problems because they are fickle. If the
egoistically motivated individual finds that self-interest can be served as well or
better without enhancing the common good, then the common good be damned.
For example, the student whose ultimate goal in volunteering at a local nursing
home is to add community service to her resume is not likely to last. Her goal has
been reached the first time she enters the building.
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Hardin quickly returned to his Cardinal Rule: Never ask a person to act against
self-interest.
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benefit the group. This action may, in turn, benefit the community as a whole (for
further discussion, see Batson, 1994).
The college student who volunteers to help Habitat for Humanity build houses
and whose ultimate goal is easing the plight of the poor is displaying collectivist
motivation. So is the gay man who, in order to serve the gay community, volunteers
to serve as buddy for someone dying of AIDS. If the persons ultimate goal is to
benefit some group, whether large or small, inclusive or exclusive, the motive is
collectivism.
Problems. Collectivist motives are not problem-free as a source of action for
the common good. Typically, we care about collectives of which we are members,
an us. Identifying with a group or collective usually involves recognition of an
outgroup, a them, who is not us. Indeed, some have suggested that a them-us
comparison is necessary to define a collective (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). The problem
is that concern to meet our needs may lead to callous indifference to their needs.
For example, when AIDS was initially labeled as a gay disease, many outside the
gay community felt little inclination to help. It was their problem.
Promise. In addition to this very real limitation, collectivist motivation has
some virtues that egoism and altruism do not. As noted, egoism and altruism are
both directed toward the welfare of individuals. Yet many community needs are
far removed from our self-interest, even enlightened self-interest, and from the
interest of those for whom we especially care. Egoism and altruism may be of
limited use in encouraging action to meet these needs. Think, for example, of the
plight of the homeless, of energy conservation, or of public services that do not
directly benefit us or our loved ones.
Such community needs are particularly difficult to address because they often
come in the form of what have been called social dilemmas. A social dilemma
arises when: (a) individuals in a group or collective have a choice about how
to allocate personally held, scarce resources (e.g., money, time, energy), and
(b) allocation to the group provides more benefit for the group as a whole than
does allocation to oneself, but allocation to oneself provides more self-benefit than
does allocation to the group (Dawes, 1980). Examples include recycling, energy
and water conservation, contributing to public TV, and supporting charities. In
such situations, the action that is best for oneself is to allocate resources to meet
ones own needs, ignoring the needs of the group as a whole. But if everyone tries
thus to maximize their own welfare, the attempt will backfire. Everyone, including
oneself, is worse off. If our imagined mayor relies on straightforward egoistic
or altruisticmotivation to address the pressing social dilemmas the community
faces, the prognosis looks bleak.
But the situation is rarely this grim. There is considerable evidence that when
faced with a social dilemma, whether in a research laboratory or in real life, many
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people do not seek to maximize only their own welfare. They seek also to enhance
the group welfare (Alfano & Marwell, 1980; Brewer & Kramer, 1986; Dawes,
McTavish, & Shaklee, 1977; Kramer & Brewer, 1984; Orbell, van de Kragt, &
Dawes, 1988; Yamagishi & Sato, 1986). The most common explanation for this
attention to group welfare is in terms of collectivist motivation. It is claimed that
under conditions of group identity, individuals can and do act with an ultimate
goal of increasing the welfare of their group (e.g., Brewer & Kramer, 1986; Dawes
et al., 1990). Whether it is possible to induce such a motive in someone who is not
a member of the group is, however, less clear.
Principlism: Serving the Community to Uphold Moral Principles
Principlism is motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding some moral principle, such as justice (Batson, 1994). It is not surprising that most moral philosophers have argued for the importance of a motive to act for common good other
than egoism. But most since Kant (1785/1898) have also argued for a motive other
than altruism and collectivism. Moral philosophers reject appeals to altruism based
on feelings of empathy, sympathy, and compassion because they find these emotions too fickle and circumscribed; they reject appeals to collectivism because it
is bounded by the limits of the collective. These philosophers typically call for
motivation with a goal of upholding some universal and impartial moral principle.
For example, philosopher John Rawls (1971) has argued for a principle of
justice based on the allocation of goods to the members of society from an initial
position behind the Veil of Ignorance, where no one knows his or her place in
societyprince or pauper, laborer or lawyer, male or female, Black or White. Why
does Rawls require such a stance? Because it eliminates partiality and seduction
by special interest.
Calls to act for the common good often appeal to principle. We are told that
it is our duty to vote, that it is not right to leave our litter in the park for someone
else to clean up, that we should give our fair share to the United Way, that we
ought to improve the community in which we live.
Problems. The major problem with principlism as a source of motivation to
act for the common good is knowing when and how a given principle applies. It
may seem that moral principles, at least universal ones, always apply. But it is not
that simple.
Most of us are adept at rationalization, at justifying to ourselvesif not to
otherswhy a situation that benefits us or those we care about does not violate our
moral principles. Why, for example, the inequalities in the public school systems
of rich and poor communities in the U.S. are not really unjust (Kozol, 1991). Why
storing our nuclear waste in someone elses backyard is fair. Why it is acceptable
to watch public TV without contributing. Why foregoing the extra effort to recycle
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is not wrong. The abstractness of most moral principles, and their multiplicity,
makes rationalization easy (Bandura, 1991; Tsang, in press). Skill in dodging
the thrust of the moral principles we espouse may explain the weak empirical
relation between principled morality and social action (Blasi, 1980). Perhaps moral
principles serve more to censure or extol others actions than to motivate our own.
Perhaps adherence to moral principles is only an instrumental goal on the way to the
egoistic ultimate goal of benefiting ourselves by avoiding social and self-censure
or gaining social- and self-esteem.
It is not that we lack moral sensibility; most of us consider ourselves to
be highly moral (Sedikides & Strube, 1997; Van Lange, 1991). Yet when our
own interest is best served by violating avowed moral principles, we may find
this relatively easy to do. We find ways to see ourselves as fairor at least
not unfairwhile avoiding the cost to self of actually being fair. Moral principles are affirmed, but the motivation to uphold these principles seems spotty and
weak.
A number of psychological processes may contribute to this weakness of
moral motivation. First, people may conveniently forget to think about their moral
principles if such an omission serves their own interests (Bersoff, 1999). Second,
people may actively rationalize (Tsang, in press), convincing themselves that their
moral principles do not apply either to the specific others whose interests conflict with their own (moral exclusionStaub, 1990) or to the specific situation
(moral disengagementBandura, 1991). Third, people may deceive themselves
into believing that they have acted morally even when they have not if there is
sufficient ambiguity to allow them to appear moral without having to be moral
(moral hypocrisyBatson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997).
Promise. More positively, if upholding moral principles can serve as an ultimate goal, defining a form of motivation independent of egoism, then perhaps
these principles can provide a rational basis for acting for the common good that
transcends reliance on self-interest or on vested interest in and feeling for the welfare of certain other individuals or groups. Quite an if, but it seems a possibility
well worth exploring.
Conflict
In sum, we can offer both good news and bad to our imaginary mayor. The
good news is the existence of motives for community involvement other than
self-interest, making available new resources. The bad news is that recognizing a
multiplicity of motives complicates matters. The different motives for acting for
the common good do not always work in harmony. As long as the welfare of self,
others, and the community are perceived to be distinct, motives to promote the
welfare of each can undercut or compete with one another.
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DAN BATSON received his PhD in Psychology from Princeton University and
is now Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas. He has conducted a
number of experiments on various forms of prosocial motivation, is the author of
The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Erlbaum Associates, 1991), and the chapter in The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed.) on
Altruism and Prosocial Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1998).
NADIA AHMAD is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of
Kansas. Her research interests include empathy, justice, and prejudice reduction;
she is particularly interested in the use of empathy to promote attitude change
towards stigmatized groups.
JO-ANN TSANG received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas.
She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Southern Methodist University.
Her research interests are in the area of Social Psychology, and include moral
rationalization and moral motivation, forgiveness, gratitude, and the psychology
of religion.